Another Day, Another Temple
I built this one on the windy fogged sands of Beverly Beach, where I type to you now via the LED light of my Petzl headlamp. Power supplies and cell-phone signal are at a premium, here, so this post won't be overlong.
It was a twenty-mile hop from the lumpy campsite at Lincoln City to here, but it was a good ride, and a good thing, too: I had a lousy night. I kept waking up, startled by traffic noise from the too-close Route 101 in town, I couldn't get comfortable on the ground I chose, and deeply weird dreams assaulted me. I woke up in a funk, and a crow stole one of my blocks of Ramen. My tube patch job from yesterday proved inadequate - the tire pressure dropped by forty pounds overnight - so I pulled the wheel off and redid the patch. The solar panels wouldn't deploy properly, requiring a rearrangement of bungies, which looked like it was going to be irrelevant anyway because of the high fog bank that rolled in and smashed everything.
But the ride was fine, especially the Otter Crest loop, which was a quiet, one-way road with a fat bike lane that wound along the craggiest coastline I've traversed so far. It's the first I've seen of sea caves eroded into cliffsides, and deeply hewn bays lined by volcanic-looking black rock tossed with spray from the crashing waves...impressive, and it more than made up for the traffic and gravel-spattered shoulders of 101 that I spent most of the day on.
Beverly Beach itself isn't the best beach I've been on - it's dominated by the rust-colored steel piers of the 101 overpass - but it did offer some amazing views of thick, luxuriant fog cascading over the hills at its northern end. Out to sea, the fog was so thick it looked as though a massive, thunderous storm was bearing down on me, but it was all cloud and no rain. The wind kept up at a steady, chilly 20 to 25 miles per hour...just within the range of my new kite! So there was some flying, which passed them time and removed any vestiges of the minor work-related stress I had to deal with as soon as I made camp.
Although, I must say: dealing with work entailed deploying the solar panels, firing up the cellular amplifier, and hoisting the antenna, so while I was tending to the client's project at a somewhat inopportune time, it was nevertheless difficult to forget that once the work was done, I was still in the middle of a forest 300 yards from the ocean. I'll have to do the same thing to get this post up, and hopefully I'll be able to do it before the Black Box's battery craps out. I still haven't got the hang of prioritizing my use of the solar panels...the immediate need is to get the laptop charged, but if I do that at the expense of the Black Box battery, then once the sun goes down I have minimal power to run the amplifier. I think the solution will be to just keep the Black Box battery charging all day while I ride, which I'll start doing tomorrow.
Now, it's time to retire to the relative warmth and bug-free interior of the tent...I'm sitting at the picnic table now, next to the antenna and the Black Box. In a minute, I'll start the process of getting this post from Eudora (which makes a fine text editor) and up onto the website, with all of the attendant pictures.
If you don't get to read this post tonight, you'll know the battery ran out before I finished.
